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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Hi, professional DNS engineer here! if anyone has any questions about the inner workings of DNS or top level domains, ask away! (THIS IS MY MOMENT)
So why do we need the .com or .org or whatever at all? And the www. as well?
I remember when I had to type the whole http://www.cakefarts.com and now just cakefarts.com works. What changed? And what's next?
The ".com" and ".org" and all other Top Level Domains are owned/controlled by some organization.
Com and org are your original TLDs, so since they were around first you see them everywhere. At some point countries got their own TLDs so Mali got "ml" for example but Tuvalu got "tv". (Yes, technically ".tv" has nothing to do with television.) And a few years back there was open bidding for a bunch of new TLDs which is where ".sport" or ".dentist" come from.
Anyone some entity owns/controls them and then can sell any word or domain under it. So if you want "greatgatsby.com" you have to talk to the ".com" owners. If you want "greatgatsby.sport" you talk to the ".sport" owners. Usually there is another company or agreement that groups these together so you can manage all your domains in one place.
So anyways now you own a domain like "greatgatsby.sport", what do you want to host? Mail at "mail.greatgatsby.sport"? A website at world wide web aka "www.greatgatsby.sport"? Up to you.
Over time, largely by convention "www" became where you put your website.
From there you have two options, you can setup a redirect from "http://greatgatsby.sport" to "http://www.greatgatsby.sport" or you can do a little hosting "trick" and just make "http://greatgatsby.sport" return your website.
So say I want a ".travel", who actually makes and sells these? Is it a private company? A country? An independent entity who's sole purpose it is to keep domains and the interwebs alive?
The last one, ICANN is the name of the organization. It's reasonable to argue they are actually the first one. Also they are based in the US, so technically the country answer also apply. HOWEVER they are suppose to be independent.
Also since you want ".travel" that's a common enough word that it is probably already owned by an entity, so you would probably have to buy it from them.
However let's say you wanted ".tchotchony" which I feel confident saying doesn't exist yet. As far as I know ICANN is not regularly taking applications for new TLDs, so you probably can't have it. Although realistically if you have enough money, you can.
Well, it's not just a money issue. There's also the "are you knowledgeable, responsible, and have DNS engineers on staff" problem. If you own your own TLD, it means you can talk directly to the root zone. You could theoretically DDOS the root zone servers and cause them to crash. They would, of course, just revoke your TLD permanently & it wouldn't really cause any noticeable disruption to the rest of the internet. You could also allow attack domains or shady websites. Maybe it could be used to pretend to be another site. Imagine owning ".conn" that would be a premium attack site TLD because it looks like "com". There's lots of other issues too.
Btw, .com is owned by the US Department of COMmerce. .org is owned by a non-profit organization called "Public Internet Registry"
To answer your other question: most likely, www.cakefarts.com is now accessible from cakefarts.com for one of three reasons:
For the 'record', www is just a really common record name. There's nothing special about it. You could have dudebro.cakefarts.com or wwwwwww.cakefarts.com. It's up to the domain owner.